Ohio LinuxFest Recap

I made it home from the Ohio LinuxFest last night and it was a bunch of fun but a long, long weekend. First, we started by having a Road Rally to the show. It was a very eclectic group of guys from Raleigh, NC who loaded up the van with ham radio equipment, power inverters, laptops, and more gadgets than I can name.
Thanks to Tanner, Matt, the Mars boys, Skip, Mark, and John for joining the rally and to Kevin for adding air support. We drove over 480 miles on Friday and the same distance on Sunday for the round trip from Raleigh to Columbus. The only downer was the big white van that was unable to break 70 MPH. I thought perhaps the load of swag was slowing us down but on further inspection I found out the van had a governor. It was bearable because of our mobile wi-fi point that kept everyone online during the whole trip, except for a short time going through the West Virginia mountains where no EVDO signal was to be found. Apologies to the chase van for waiting for us throughout the trip.
We would also like to thank everyone who stopped by our booth. Who would have thought Columbus,OH was such a hotbed for open source enthusiasts? We talked to well over 800 people during the day and gave out close to 400 t-shirts and hats.

I was blown away by the attendance at our morning talk,”Open Source Monitoring with Zenoss Core”. We had over 250 people in attendance for that talk and the questions were excellent. I found out a lot about how people monitor their networks from that talk and how we can make Zenoss better. Interesting results from our straw polls included:

• By far the most requested platform for running Zenoss Core is Debian Core
• Second was Fedora/Red Hat/CentOS
• Third was a surprise, Free BSD
• About two-thirds of attendees already were already using open source monitoring (mostly Nagios and some MRTG with a side of Cacti/RRDTool)

I am working on opening development tickets on the questions I received. Including how to run checks against multiple Windows domains and reports of VMware Tools for ESX server not working optimally in our VMware images. There were so many great questions and ideas, I am still running through all the notes I took and will post the follow-up on our blog later this week.

For the booth visitors, thanks for stopping and watching demos and asking questions about Zenoss. We really enjoyed talking to you, Mark Turner says he never worked so hard at an expo and he’s done tons of them. I am sure some of you will be hearing from him soon.

Thanks to all of you who attended our “Deployment Options for Zenoss Enterprise” in the afternoon and bearing with me as I was losing my voice. It was a good session and the questions got me thinking about improvements we should make to Zenoss Core. I will be opening some tickets in our trac system to try to get these suggestions into our development plans.

Finally a big thank you to the folks who organized the Ohio Linuxfest, we will definitely be returning next year.